The Drowned (eBook)

A Strafford and Quirke Murder Mystery

John Banville (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-37084-9 (ISBN)

Infos

THE BRAND NEW STRAFFORD AND QUIRKE MURDER MYSTERY FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SNOW. A CHILLING MUST-READ. 'Haunting . . . compelling.' DAILY MAIL 'Banville is one of my favourite writers alive.' REBECCA F. KUANG 'The repressed and sinister world of 1950s Ireland is exposed in beautiful, sometimes chilling prose.' FINANCIAL TIMES He had seen drowned people. A sight not to be forgotten. 1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach, but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person's case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally - the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke - a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways. Praise for Snow: 'Superb . . . crime fiction for the connoisseur.' The Times 'Outstanding.' Irish Independent 'Exquisite.' Daily Mail 'Compelling.' Sunday Times 'Superb to the last drop.' Independent On UK bestseller list w/e 13/11/2021-27/11/2021 for Paperback Fiction

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, the 2005 Booker Prize-winning The Sea, and, more recently, the bestselling Strafford and Quirke crime series, which has twice been shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger.

Textauszug

1

He had lived alone for so long, so far away from the world and its endless swarms of people, that when he saw the strange thing standing at a slight list in the middle of the field below the house, for a second he didn’t know what it was. In the gloaming, two red lights glared at him out of the long grass like the eyes of a wild animal crouched and ready to spring. His heart gave three dull slow thumps; he felt them in his ears, like the beating of a distant drum.

But it wasn’t an animal. It was a motor car, low-slung, sleek and expensive looking, painted a burnished shade of dark gold. In the gathering shadows it gave off a muted, sinister glow. The engine was running, and thick grey-white smoke was trickling slowly out of the exhaust pipe at the back and dispersing in ghostly wisps.

The door on the right-hand side, the driver’s door, stood wide open on its hinges. Again he thought of an animal, jaws agape, bellowing in pain and fury. But there was no sound to be heard, except that of the faint breeze rustling through the bowed grasses and the leaning brambles still loaded with overripe blackberries.

A car sitting in a field below someone’s house. So what? No concern of his. The wise thing to do would be to walk on, past the gateway, as if he had seen nothing, and go home and mind his own business. Yet something held him there. Later, of course, he would regret that he should have paused even for a second. But by then it was too late, and he was caught up among people, again.

People, the bane of his life.

It was bound to have happened, sooner or later. The one thing the world would not do was leave you alone, in peace, by yourself. Always it had to draw you in, insisting you take part in the fun and games like everyone else. Children: the world was full to bursting with children. Not real children, those magical, achingly precious creatures, but stunted, ill-developed homunculi all marching up and down stamping their feet and gesticulating. He had been frightened of them when he was little and they were all still children or pretending to be, and they frightened him now more than ever, when they were pretending to be grown-ups.

Yes, life, so-called, was a birthday party gone wild, with shouting and squabbling, and games he didn’t know the rules of, and one lot ganging up on the other, and knocking each other down and dancing in a ring like savages, the whole mad rampage going on in a haze of dust and noise and horrible, hot stinks.

That was the world for you, all right. Their world.

He put his things down behind the gate post, his fishing rod and his old floppy shoulder bag – not much of an afternoon’s catch, three medium-sized bass, and a pollock he would fry for the dog – and the old tin cash box that he kept his sandwiches in. He hesitated a moment, but then, even though his heart was still going like a tom-tom, he went in at the gate. You fool, he told himself, even as he advanced, why can’t you mind your own business?

He walked along the grassy hump that ran between the twin ruts of the driveway, his legs moving as if by themselves, leading him towards – what?

The house was some way off, at the top of the rise, and he could see only the roof and part of a gable end.

He came to the spot where the car had abruptly veered left and plunged deep into the field, and he turned and followed in its twin zigzag tracks through the tall grass.

It was a sports car, a Mercedes SL, so it said in raised letters on the lid of the boot, with a retractable roof of stiff black canvas. He knew little about cars, but enough to know this was no run-of-the-mill model. Who would have left such a costly machine sitting in the middle of an overgrown field, with the lights on and the engine running? There was a mingled smell of exhaust fumes, hot metal and leather upholstery. Also a trace of a woman’s perfume, musky, slightly rank – or was he imagining it? He leaned down and looked inside.

A silver key ring dangled from the ignition, and on the ring was a leather tab bearing a small round metal shield stamped with the three-pointed Mercedes logo. The little thing struck the one intimate note among so much steel and chrome and glass. Someone owned that ring and its key, someone kept it in a pocket, or in a purse, someone twirled it on a finger, and sat in behind the steering wheel and leaned forward with it pressed between a finger and a thumb and inserted it in its groove and turned it and made the engine roar into life. Someone.

He found the switch for the lights and turned them off, then turned off the engine too, leaving the key in its slot. When he swung the door to, he used too much force and it slammed shut with a thud that seemed to him as loud as a thunderclap. Then the silence crowded in around him once more. There was the sense of everything pressing forward eagerly, like bystanders at the scene of an accident, or a crime.

Yes, there must have been a row, that must be what happened. A person would have to have lost the run of himself, or herself, to leave a Mercedes SL sports car standing here like this, with the key in the ignition, even on this lonely stretch of coast. There were some wild fellows going about here, real yahoos, half-wild farmers’ sons, day labourers, now and then an IRA man down from the North to lie low after yet another botched bomb attempt or an inept raid on a customs post. Those boyos wouldn’t hesitate to hop in and take this gilded beauty for a spin, and more than likely leave it wrapped around a tree trunk along the road somewhere, steaming and smoking, or nose down in six feet of water in some hidden rocky inlet.

The field, or meadow, as he supposed it should be called, rose at a shallow angle in the direction of the house. He made his way to the top of the slope, and stopped and looked about him. The late-October evening was fading fast, yet in the sky in the west a long bar of cloud was whitely aglow, so bright that he had to put up a hand to shade his eyes. It had been an uncommonly fine month so far, and the weather seemed set to last for a good while yet. He dearly hoped it would. Not that he had much time for summer and sunshine and games and all that rot, but the thought of the winter coming on made his heart shrink. Would he be able to hold out, living like an outcast – but wasn’t he an outcast? – seeing not a soul and hearing from no one?

He would have to manage somehow. There was no going back. He couldn’t be trusted, in the world, among people, among—

Stop! He shut his eyes and struck a fist against his forehead.

Take a deep breath. Another. And another. Now.

He opened his eyes.

To his left, the surface of the evening sea was chopped, metallic, faintly aglitter. Not a thing to be seen out there, no ship or sail, nothing between here and the Welsh coast, invisible beyond the horizon. He turned his gaze inland. The house stood at the end of the grassy track leading up from the gate. It was a fair-sized, two-storey farmhouse, built of granite, with a steep slate roof ashine now in the light from the west, two tall chimneys, and a wrought-iron weathervane in the shape of a cock crowing.

Why was he hanging about here? What business was it of his, he asked himself again, what had he to do with this abandoned car and whoever had abandoned it? He told himself again that if he had any sense at all he should go, should turn on his heel this very second, walk back down to the gate and gather up his rod and his bag and his sandwich box, and take himself off smartly, before the owners of the car returned from wherever they had gone to and drew him inexorably into some ghastly, complicated mess of their own making.

At that moment, as if the thought had conjured the thing, he heard a voice call out behind him. He spun round to see a figure wading towards him up through the meadow, from the direction of the sea. It was a man, lanky looking, with unsteady legs and rubbery knees. He was waving an arm above his head, urgently, like someone drowning and coming up for the second time. Again came that call, but the words were lost in the immensities of land and sky and sea.

What to do? Oh, God, what to do? Turn and run, as he should have done already? The bag and the fishing tackle he could come back for another time, no one would think the stuff worth the taking. He could pretend he hadn’t seen the man, with the light fading, and hadn’t heard him either.

But it was already too late.

Trapped!

‘Listen, listen – you’ve got to help me,’ the man gasped, stumbling up the last few yards of the slope with a long pale hand pressed to his heaving chest. ‘I think my wife has drowned herself.’

*

His name, he said, was Armitage. He was tall and very thin, with bony shoulders and a concave chest and a high narrow head and small dark eyes set too close together. His oiled hair was combed straight back from his forehead: it looked, to Wymes’s eye, like a Channel swimmer’s tight black rubber cap. Under a gabardine raincoat he wore a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, and wide, cream-coloured trousers that flapped loosely around his skinny shins. The sharp-pointed...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• ISBN-10: 0-571-37084-5 / 0571370845
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-37084-9 / 9780571370849